


Suffer a Sea Change

by Lyrstzha



Category: Angel: the Series, Firefly
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-01
Updated: 2008-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:50:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of how a vampire named Spike turned up as a test subject at the Academy and met a girl called River.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suffer a Sea Change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brunettepet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brunettepet/gifts).



River rocked a little in her chair, leaning her elbows on the table and curling her arms up over her head to hide her face. Too many people here, muttering in her ears and in her head, not shut up properly in their own skulls like they ought to be.

And, of course, she wasn't in her own skull either, the way a real girl ought to be. "Broken, broken, broken," she chanted under her breath, and the jagged edge of the consonant 'k' caught at the back of her throat like she was choking on it.

The test subjects were allowed to socialize a little once a week in the well-guarded common room, if they were cooperative the rest of the week. Many of River's fellows made use of the scant hour of contact to murmur across the steel tables to each other, hopelessness reflecting off of hopelessness. River didn't bother—the mostly normal people were loud enough, and those more like her were devastatingly deafening; she stayed alone at a table in the corner, as far from the others as she could get.

The scientists called this hour of socializing a reward, though River thought it was funny that they bothered to equivocate like that; of course she knew it was really an opportunity for them to observe how their subjects interacted together. Or rather, it was supposed to be, but the orderlies who had been assigned to observe today were really much more interested in flirting with each other. That should have left the only watchful eye the vid pickup in the ceiling, but River could feel the tickle of its scrutiny leave the back of her neck as it stopped recording her. A low, scratching hum swept across her skin in its place, and the words 'jamming device' popped unbidden into River's mind.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she whispered to no one in particular. She stiffened, tensing into complete stillness as the scratching hum surged powerfully, accompanied by a figure who stepped into her peripheral vision and sat down across from her. She darted a quick glance up warily, finding a slender man with platinum blond hair regarding her with obvious interest.

"Name's Spike. Who're you, then?" His voice had a warm accent to it, but there was something like sharp teeth beneath the sound of the words that River could not quite get a grip on yet.

River opened her mouth and Lao-tzu came rushing out unexpectedly. "'He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.'" Sometimes things shook loose from her brainpan and fell out of her mouth when she wasn't very careful.

Spike raised one eyebrow at her. "Right," he finally said, in a gently amused tone. "There a nickname for that, pet?"

"River," she pronounced gravely. "Body of water broader than a stream, always empties into the ocean, everything it is swallowed up in deep fathoms of cold blue." She held her body utterly still, but her eyes jumped back up towards Spike like they were trying to escape her face. "Fathom. Means measurement of depth, but also to understand."

"Knew that, actually." Spike leaned forwards a little, his hands pressed against the metal surface of the table in full view, clearly not threatening. He watched her keenly, gaze feeling like it cut into her skin, too _close_, too _sharp_. "River, eh? You been swallowed up by understandin' lately, have you?"

And he asked because he actually cared about the answer, she could tell; he really wanted to _know_. River twitched slightly, the urge to escape from the way he made her feel like a butterfly pinned to the wall and the unexpected need to make him really see her contradicting themselves in the very tissue of her muscles. "Malescience," she finally answered. "'Mal', bad from the Latin. And 'science', for knowledge. Not really a word, but it should be." She barked a high, ragged laugh. "Made up word for a made up girl."

But Spike just nodded thoughtfully, unfazed. "You remind me of someone. She got swallowed up by things she wished she didn't understand, too."

River's head slowly rolled to the side like she was a puppet with the strings gradually going slack. Her eyelids slid down until only a faint crescent of white gleamed beneath her lashes. In a quiet, dreamy voice, River murmured, "She talked to the stars and they answered her in a full chorus, rich harmonies crashing over her like waves, singing her so full of secrets that she came apart at the seams."

Spike's eyes narrowed, and he leaned even farther across the table to say softly, "You remind me of her a bit more than I thought. Fair warnin', pet: you don't wanna go walkin' through my head. Not the kind of place little girls should see."

River shuddered, her eyelids fluttering slightly but remaining at half-mast. "You're all red on the inside. Imbrued in a sanguine sea."

Spike leaned back again, his sharp gaze finally sliding away from River like a lifting weight. He offered her a half-shrug. "Well, you are what you eat, yeah?" He looked down, apparently studying the chips in his fingernails.

River opened her eyes all the way and frowned quizzically at him. "You can wear another face." She gasped almost silently, smelling her own pain and despair through his nose, seeing fangs and blood. So much death and suffering and loss, centuries of it spooling out vertiginously before her inner eye. "Dead man walking," she choked out, bile rising in her throat.

Through the red haze of his memories laid across her vision, River could see Spike raise hooded eyes back to hers. "Not here to hurt you, River," he told her gravely. "I promise I'm not."

River nodded, swallowing convulsively and blinking to try to clear her sight. "No, I know. You only wear your monster on the outside now. Not like me."

Spike shook his head and reached slowly and carefully across the table to brush two fingers across her left temple. "Maybe I don't know exactly what these wankers have done to you, but I tell you, if there's one thing I've learned these last few centuries, it's that anyone can hold onto their soul if they try hard enough. You don't wanna be a monster, you work at it 'til you aren't." He gave her forehead a single, gentle tap with his index finger. "You're a bright girl. You'll learn."

River held his gaze for a long moment, staring into that human-but-not face. And then her eyes snapped open even wider, looking right into him again. "Not like before. You let them catch you this time," she cried. "Played bird with a broken wing."

Spike gave a slight, abortive jerk forwards, and raised a hushing hand hastily. "Shh, pet! Let's not be spreadin' that bit 'round, all right?" He glanced up, all sidelong and casual, at the orderlies on guard at the doors. He settled back when they remained deep in bantering conversation with each other, his shoulders sliding down as he relaxed. He offered River a small smile and self-deprecating, sideways jerk of his chin. "Wasn't exactly gonna fall for a virgins' blood party again, was I? Learned a _few_ things over the years, after all. Figure this is gonna be the best capture by a secret government organization I've ever had, long as they don't get another chip in my noggin the way I expect they plan to."

River started a bit as the echo of an electric shock from his memory buzzed deep in her brain. She shook herself like a dog throwing off water, and the sensation mercifully faded. She refocused with effort, hunting down the train of thought she'd been chasing through his synapses before his old pain distracted her. "You came for _me_," she whispered, almost reverently, when she caught it.

"Well," Spike blew his breath out in a philosophical sigh. "Not specifically. Just came for a spot of recon, see what was what with the disappearin' kids an' all. Been hearin' the strangest rumors 'bout this place." He frowned as River's face fell. "Hey, none of that. I'm here for you _now_. Not just gonna run off an' leave the princess with the dragon, am I?"

And abruptly a _dragon_ came roaring to unbelievable life from his memory, and River tipped her head forward, letting her hair swing down in a curtain to shield her. Too incredible, too much, too loud, too _red_. But she didn't flinch when Spike's hand brushed her knee beneath the table.

"Look," Spike said, his voice soft yet intense. "Pretty soon I'm gettin' out of here—best we don't talk too much on _how_, an' I'd appreciate it if you kept that bit mum. Gonna take back everything I've learned 'bout this place to some friends of mine—nicest dodgy folks that ever skulked around a blackout zone—an' they're gonna start workin' on breakin' you an' the other kids out. All right?"

River tilted her head to the side, her hair sliding to reveal one eye burning back at Spike. "Make them tell _Simon_," she hissed urgently.

"Simon? That someone you got on the outside?"

River nodded solemnly. "Simon Tam. He'd come for me, if he knew how and where."

Spike's fingers tightened over her knee, feeling like a promise. "Simon Tam," he repeated carefully. "River, I swear to you, if my people can find him, we'll make sure he knows." He shook his head. "Bloody hell, if he's got the nerve—an' maybe a spot of cash for some bribes an' a getaway boat—we'll do more than that."

River slipped one of her slim hands into her lap and brushed her fingertips over the inside of his pulse-less wrist. "Safe harbor," she whispered. "You keep your promises now, protect the girl until the end of the world."

Spike blinked a little, slightly startled, but River could feel the pride and pleasure at the recollection she'd invoked well up inside him, and his lips curved into a faint, shadowed smile. "Way past that these days, love," he told her. "Until the end of all the worlds turnin' now." And his hand turned under hers, curling to press palm to palm, fingers lacing together.

"Champion," River breathed softly, like a prayer.

"Nah," Spike denied. "Gave up on flashy titles years ago. Don't get you anythin' but gaudy trinkets an' meddlin' Powers." He shrugged it aside. "Just think of me as...," he grinned suddenly, wide and bright, "a lifeguard. Gonna full-on Baywatch this swallowin' ocean of yours."

The ridiculous and outlandish mental image 'Baywatch' carried in his head surprised a giggle from River. It seemed strangely shaped in her throat, and she could not remember the last time she had truly laughed without the taint of hysteria. "I fathom," she told him, startled and delighted to discover that, at least for the moment, she really _did_. She turned this precious piece of lucidity over and over in her mind, committing the feel of it to memory. She had a suspicion she was going to need it later.

River tightened her grip on Spike's hand for a moment, then let him go a split second before the sonorous chime indicating the end of the social hour sounded. The full team of orderlies came through the door and began to herd their charges up and out.

"Simon Tam," Spike managed to whisper before the orderlies came close enough to hear. Then he winked at her, leaped abruptly to his feet with a flash of hot defiance that resonated from him like a roar to River's perceptions, and raised his voice to declare loudly, "Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change," Spike gasped and faltered a bit as an orderly prodded him pointedly with a shock-stick, but his voice caught and held to finish, "Into something rich and strange."

As Spike was dragged away, spitting invective at the guards with all the range and creativity of lifetimes' worth of practice, River kept her eyes on his face. This, too, she hoarded in a tiny corner of her mind, curling her thoughts around it for warmth as she was taken back to her own cell for the night. Strange, she mused to herself, that Spike emitted no radiant heat, but warmed her just the same. Emotions must not follow the laws of thermodynamics, she concluded.

"Effulgent," River crooned to herself almost silently, huddled tightly in on herself on her narrow bed in the darkness that was never, ever quiet enough. She repeated it over and over, until the syllables slurred into meaninglessness and lulled her deep into dream-ridden sleep.


End file.
